


Eyeballs and Apple Candy

by yhlee (etothey)



Category: Hawk & Fisher - Simon R. Green
Genre: Action/Adventure, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-12-01
Updated: 2011-12-01
Packaged: 2017-10-26 18:18:09
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,494
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/286441
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/etothey/pseuds/yhlee
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Hawk and Fisher have the misfortune of being assigned to test nonlethal weapons.  Naturally, they're attacked by a demon.  Banter and tentacles ensue.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Eyeballs and Apple Candy

**Author's Note:**

  * For [cmshaw](https://archiveofourown.org/users/cmshaw/gifts).



In the evening, some cities become beautiful: the lanterns glow brightly, the Quality go out for strolls to show off their fine cloaks and the bright jewels on their hands, and the colors of sunset ripple through the canals, or the river, or puddles from the day's gentle rain. There are public gardens heady with flowers, or fountains splashing bright as crystal, or equestrian statues sporting heroic poses. You might be able to hear flute music as you go by, or the sonorous voices of the best storytellers as they recite stories of flashing blades and last stands against the long night. People don't fear to be abroad when the sun is going down in cities like these.

And then there's Haven.

Tonight the Northside, the worst part of Haven, was its usual grim, glum, unsanitary self. That would have been bad enough, but it had been a long day already for Hawk and Fisher, and it was a sure thing that something would happen before the end of the shift.

Hawk and Isobel Fisher, husband and wife, were Guard Captains. They were probably the only honest ones in all of Haven, and dangerous with it. At the moment everyone on the street was giving them a wide berth. Even the beggars were huddled into the shadows, just on principle, although they didn't really have anything to worry about.

Hawk was tall, dark, and no longer handsome. He occasionally got up early in the morning to glare into the mirror. He believed in cultivating a good glare, and had a theory that with only one eye he could develop a glare that was twice as potent. Fisher hadn't yet disabused him of the notion. Unlike most Guards, Hawk normally wielded an axe, on account of his lack of depth perception. Besides, he liked the directness of the weapon. No one ever got sentimental notions about duels and derring-do when an axe was involved.

Isobel Fisher was tall, easily six feet in height, and she wore her blond hair in a long plait weighted by a single steel ball at the end. While Hawk was still an idealist at heart, Fisher was a cynic. She was also, more relevantly to the people who faced them, a fiend with a sword. She wasn't a Bladesmaster--few of those ended up in the Guard, historically speaking--but she was the next best thing, and if she had ordinary human weaknesses, she kept them in an iron strongbox where no one could find them.

Today the two of them were in an especially foul mood because of the tasers--Tactical Antagonist Subjugation Elemental Rapiers--that they had been assigned. The Guard sorcerers were always experimenting with new weapons, and due to complaints about the Guard using excessive force, they'd come up with a no-kill weapon that would behave like ordinary rapiers, but leave the victims knocked out with only phantom wounds that cleared up in twenty-four hours. Or that was the theory, anyway. Hawk was grumpy because no one had thought to hand him the axe version of the damn thing, and their superiors had been very firm that neither he nor Fisher was to carry or use their usual weapons. Fisher was skeptical of the whole enterprise, especially after the last experimental weapon they had been assigned. She still remembered, with unpleasant clarity, the number of times they had had to vomit after that "improved" smoke bomb had gone off in their faces. And that had been one of the milder failures. Besides, walking around with a rapier--or something that looked like one--was just asking for trouble in the Northside, where people preferred bludgeoning weapons and overwhelming force.

"Well, lass," Hawk said eventually, as they reached the end of the street, "maybe we'll be able to go off-shift in the next hour with no further incident. Have a nice quiet soak in the tub."

Fisher chuckled nastily. "Don't get too comfortable. Besides, I have dibs. You like to lie there for ages. And then you fall asleep and I have to haul you out. I'm of a mind to leave you in there next time and let you wake up in the--"

They both stilled as a movement in the shadows caught their attention. Hawk caught Fisher's eye, and she nodded slightly.

They kept walking, a little more slowly. The shadow was definitely following them. Ordinarily this wouldn't have worried Hawk, but he had the feeling that the taser was going to get in his way. And the Guard sorcerer who had handed it to him had made it clear that she was going to be very cranky if Hawk didn't make a good show of testing it. Hawk had a healthy respect for cranky people, which probably came from being one himself.

"Hawk," Fisher said in a low voice, "did you get a look at its reflection?" She glanced at a shop window. The reflection showed a great seething mass of tentacles and teeth where the shadow should have been.

"Demon?" Hawk guessed.

The shadow launched itself at them, elongating horribly into tentacles with teeth, and a boiling mass of eyes fringed with teeth. It wouldn't have surprised Fisher if the teeth had teeth as well. She speared the most threatening of the tentacles with her taser. There was an electrical hiss as the sword made its puncture, and a painfully bright blue spark. Eyes sprouted from the cauterized wound. Each eye's pupil had a tiny bloated face inside it, like a homunculus trapped in amber. Then the eyes popped open with a many-throated scream, spattering her with greenish ichor.

Meanwhile, Hawk was thanking whatever gods were listening, which probably weren't many, that with that many tentacles it wasn't too hard to hit something. Of course, the downside was the sheer number of tentacles. In his youth, before he'd lost his eye, he would have been able to dispatch the thing singlehanded, even with such an unsuitable weapon. Now he was glad to have Fisher at his back. They'd seen a great many horrors together, many worse than this, and lived through the long night. More than a lot of people would have been able to say.

"Hawk," Fisher said, "I think we have a problem."

"You just noticed?"

"Shut up." She jerked her chin toward the severed tentacles. They were growing cilia and skittering back toward the parent demon.

"I knew nonlethal weapons were a terrible idea," Hawk said with disgust. "Does this mean that if I cut the nose off a drug dealer it'll grow little legs and reattach itself to his face?"

"You have the most unpleasant imagination," Fisher said. She ducked under some more tentacles and stabbed ineffectually at the demon's midsection. "I should hire you out to some sorcerers sometime. Besides, who the hell decided to make these weapons rapier-shaped? The only way you're going to remove someone's nose with this thing is if you make a bunch of little punctures to help you rip it off."

Hawk gave her a look, then decided to ignore the image. "Lass, we're not making any progress here." He took a quick look around: sure enough, everybody with any sense had cleared the hell out of the immediate area, although there were a couple people spectating from second-story windows. Boredom, probably. You could find a lot of cheap entertainment in the Northside if you had a forgiving definition of "entertainment."

The demon seemed to be slowing down a little. They circled it warily. "Okay," Fisher said, "there's that factory down the way."

"Candy Sally's factory? She's going to complain loudly to the authorities."

"Good," Fisher said unsympathetically. "Her toffees look like they were boiled out of dead orphans' boots.--Now!"

They broke into a sprint, trusting that the demon would follow them. It wasn't terribly surprising that they were proven right, and it wasn't just their long experience dealing with demons. The thing had probably figured out that, for whatever reason, they weren't using lethal force, and had decided that they would make a delicious meal.

Factory workers scattered and screamed as Hawk and Fisher burst through the door. The treacly smell of boiling candy was heavy in the air. Hawk could almost feel the stuff coating his lungs. It was hard not to gag. Sure, Fisher liked to rib him about his taste for torte, but there was such a thing as too much. And besides, his hindbrain kept trying to tell him that there were less pleasant odors mixed in with all the imported sugar: flavorings derived from poisonous mushrooms, or the scrapings of a murderer's teeth, or the vapor from an anatomist's lab.

"I'm imagining things," Hawk said in an undertone, glancing around to assess the exits. There were high walkways with inadequate railings--he wondered how many workers they lost each year--and ceiling vents too high to reach. The great candy cauldrons bubbled merrily, unattended and not yet starting to scorch. He'd heard once that candy-making was an even more delicate enterprise than baking, not that he had any experience with either.

"You're not authorized to be here!" said a woman's high, sharp voice. It was Candy Sally, the only one who hadn't fled, wearing her accustomed satin finery in pink-and-white stripes and a burgundy capelet. Fisher had always thought of it as the kind of fashion that a peppermint stick would come up with if it had delusions of grandeur.

Hawk gestured at the demon, which had paused in front of the door to the factory, waving its tentacles around as if confused by the panoply of smells. "Guard business," he said shortly. "Get your workers out of here!"

It was redundant because everyone else had known to get the hell out of the way of Guards, even Guards wielding rapiers. But Candy Sally scowled at them and said, "If you gum up the quotas, I'll sue. You'd be surprised how many people in Haven have a sweet tooth."

"Yeah, sure, whatever," Hawk said. He made a note to himself to check out whether Candy Sally had any ties with the drug trade, or worse, alchemists. "You mind getting out of the way so we can dispatch this thing?"

Muttering to herself, Candy Sally ran with surprising agility to a nondescript door, flung herself through, and slammed it shut behind her.

"I'm not looking forward to that lawsuit," Hawk muttered. "Especially if I have to look at any more eye-clashing outfits like that one."

"Will you concentrate for a moment? Here it comes," Fisher said, eyes narrowed. The demon seemed to have gotten its bearings. "Bait it up the walkways?"

"Sounds like a plan," Hawk said, more confidently than he felt. He remembered the last time he had had to climb an escape ladder that turned out to be attached to the wall by nothing more than a bunch of nails that were more rust than iron. But surely the walkways themselves were more or less sound, even if the railings were a disaster waiting to happen?

"Don't lose your nerve," Fisher said. "It's only a demon. Probably has the brains of a stunted snail."

"There was that time with the--"

"Not now," Fisher said through gritted teeth.

The demon's scuttling was louder than they remembered it, worryingly so. As it rushed them, they saw that it had assimilated the limbs of some unlucky corpses--at least, Fisher hoped they had been corpses. The faces of rats squeaked and chittered from the knots of tentacles, only to vanish and be replaced by the glowing eyes of spiders. Hawk's blood ran cold. He hated spiders.

"Chin up," Fisher said heartlessly, "at least it's only a demon," and she ran for the walkway. Hawk pelted after her, thinking that in his youth he would have been clear across the factory by now.

The demon was shedding pieces of itself as it shambled toward them, only to pick up new pieces: shoes with holes in them, bent spoons, lucky charms made of cheap tin. It roared gleefully as it loomed over Hawk and Fisher. They backed away from it, leading it to the walkway's edge. There was a cauldron of something sweetly apple-scented below them. The demon lurched forward, and the walkway creaked alarmingly.

The demon drew all its trailing tentacles and shoelaces and rat traps in, then lashed out. Fisher parried the tentacles without thinking, trusting to years of training and blind instinct. Hawk watched tensely for an opening--there it was! He lunged and pierced the demon through its central mass with his taser.

There was another blue spark, a larger one, and the demon screamed its hatred in languages no longer spoken in the mortal realm. It swiped ineffectually at Hawk's arm, but the taser was taking effect, and it collapsed in on itself like an unusually large and ichorous hairball.

"How long do you think that knockout effect lasts?" Fisher said in a low voice.

"Probably not long enough."

They both looked at the cauldron of molten apple-scented sugar.

"That should hold it until our backup can figure out what they want to do with it," Hawk said tentatively.

"I am never going to be able to look at a sweet again," Fisher said with feeling.

By kicking, shoving, and dragging, they managed to haul the inert demon--surprisingly heavy for something that looked like it was all whippy tentacles and stray tendrils of dust--and shove it over the edge. It made an awful glooping sound as it settled into the cauldron and sank into the liquid candy. A couple bubbles floated to the surface.

"Let's get out of here before Candy Sally figures out that it's all over," Fisher said.

"I don't know," Hawk said. "She might decide she likes apple-demon-flavored candies as a new marketing gimmick. I'm told fashions in candy change even more quickly than fashions among the Quality."

Fisher groaned, but forgot all about the remark until two weeks later, when she and Hawk were heading to a tavern to grab some dinner. Thankfully, they were both allowed to use their usual weapons again. As one higher-up had put it, the tasers had been deemed "too intellectually demanding for the average Guard." Hawk figured that this was bureaucrat for "we messed up but can't be seen admitting it."

They rounded a corner and spotted a girl gleefully taking a lollipop out of her mouth to examine it. The lollipop was pale, ichorous green and had a couple of very familiar eyes embedded in it.

"Apple-flavored, do you think?" Hawk asked, sotto voce.

Fisher shuddered. "Rather not know, thanks."

"Think we ought to warn her?"

"They're eyeballs," Fisher said pointedly. "Staring at her. I think she's as warned as she wants to be."

"That's the Northside for you," Hawk said after a while, and they passed on, looking forward to a bit of rest before the next crisis, apple-flavored or otherwise.


End file.
